Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties
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of Christine Brooke-Rose. Ellen G. Friedman and Richard Martin, eds. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. ---. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1994. Mengham, Rod. “In the Net: B.S. Johnson, the Biography and Trawl”. Re-Reading B.S. Johnson. Philip Tew and Glyn White, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ---. “Introduction”. An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: international Writing in English since 1970. London: Polity, 1999. Middleton, Roger. “Keynes’ Legacy for Post-War Economic Management”. Post-War Britain, 1945 – 64: Themes and Perspectives. Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas, eds. London: Pinter, 1989. Miliband, Ralph. Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour. Ponypool: Fernwood Publishing, 1972. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Virago, 1977. Moore, Nathan. “Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control”. Law and Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2007. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. London: Pimlico, 1991. Morley, Loraine. “The Love Affair(s) of Ann Quin”. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) , Vol. 5, No. 2. Debrecen: Centre of Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), 1999. “Mr. Calder Takes a Civil Liberty”. In Defence of Literature: For John Calder. Howard Aster, ed. New York: Mosaic Press, 1999. Nadeau, Maurice. The French Novel Since the War. A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. London: Methuen, 1967. Neugeboren, Jay. “The Texture of Life Lived”. Review of Contemporary Fiction No. 17
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Shaun Whiteside, trans. Michael Tanner, ed. London: Penguin, 2003. Nuttall, Jeff. Bomb Culture. St Albans: Paladin, 1970. Oakley, Ann. Housewife. London: Penguin, 1990. ---. Sex, Gender and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972. Orr, John. Tragic Realism and Modern Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Modern
Oxenhandler, Neal. “Listening to Burroughs’ Voice”. Surfiction. Raymond Federman, ed. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975. Palmer, Tony. The Trials of Oz. London: Blond and Briggs, 1971. Phillips, Tom. “Introduction”. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson, 2012. Poulantzas, Nicos. “The New Petty Bourgeoisie”. Class and Class Structure. Alan Hunt, ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. Quin, Ann. Berg. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. ---. “From The Unmapped Country: an unfinished novel”. Beyond the Words. Giles Gordon, ed. London: Hutchinson, 1975. ---. Letter to Larry Goodell. 25th September, 1969. Posted on Ann Quin Facebook Page. ---. List of Recommended Books [approx. 1960s]. Posted on Ann Quin Facebook Page. ---. Passages. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. ---. Three. Brian Evenson, intro. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. ---. Tripticks. Carol Annand, illustrations. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002. Rabinovitz, Rubin. “Mass Art and Cultural Decline”. Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 9, 1975.
Rees, Gareth and John Lambert. Cities in Crisis: The Political Economy of Urban Development in Post-War Britain. London: Edward Arnold, 1985. Reyes, Heather. “The British and their ‘Fixions’, the French and their Factions”. Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose. Ellen G. Friedman and Richard Martin, eds. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Robinson, H. and C.G. Bamford. Geography of Transport. London: Macdonal and Evans, 1978. Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Rourke, Lee. “Book of a Lifetime: Berg by Ann Quin”. The Independent. 27th August, 2010. Rubin, Jerry. Do It! New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Ryf, Robert S. “B.S. Johnson and the Frontiers of Fiction”. Critique, Vol. 19. Glasgow, 1977.
Sampson, Anthony. Anatomy of Britain Today. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965. Sandbrook, Dominic. White Heat: A History of the Swinging Sixties. London: Little, Brown, 2006. Schiele, Jinnie. Off-Centre Stages: Fringe Theatre at the Open Space and the Round House 1968 – 1983. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2005. Seddon, Melanie. “B.S. Johnson and Maureen Duffy: Aspiring Writers.” BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, Issue 1. Forthcoming. 2014. Seymore-Ure, Colin. The British Press and Broadcasting Since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Short, John R. Housing in Britain: The Post-war Experience. London: Mathuen, 1982. Stevick, Philip. “Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin”. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Sugnet, Charles. “Burns’ Aleatoric Celebrations: Smashing Hegemony at the Sentence Level”. Review of Contemporary Fiction No. 17 (2) 1997. ---. “Introduction”. The Imagination on Trial. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet, eds. London: Allison and Busby, 1981. Tew, Philip. B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. Print. ---. “(Re)-Acknowledging B.S. Johnson’s Radical Realism, or Re-Publishing The
---. The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum, 2007. Tew, Philip and Glyn White. “Introduction: Re-Reading B.S. Johnson.” Re-Reading B.S.
Thane, Pat. “Towards Equal Opportunities? Women in Britain since 1945”. Britain Since 1945. Terry Gourvish and Alan O’Day, eds. London: Macmillan, 1991. The Times, 2nd October, 1963. Thomas, Donald. Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain. London: John Murray, 2008. Thompson, Ben, ed. Ban this Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Thompson, Denys. “Introduction”. Discrimination and Popular Culture. London: Penguin, 1965. Thompson, E.P. “The Making of Class”. Class. Patrick Joyce, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Tredell, Nicolas. Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B.S. Johnson. Nottingham: Pauper’s Press, 2010. Ward, Geoff. “The Mutations of William Burroughs”. An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970. London: Polity, 1999. Watts, Carol. “’The Mind has Fuses’: Detonating B.S. Johnson”. Re-Reading B.S. Johnson. Philip Tew and Glyn White, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Waxman, Zoe Vania. Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Webb, Bill. “Calder vs. The Old Boys”. In Defence of Literature: For John Calder. New York: Mosaic Press, 1999. Wells, Juliette. “Eva Figes”. Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction. Brian Shaffer, ed. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2011. Wheen, Francis. Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. White, Glyn. Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. ---. “‘You Are Here’: Reading and Representation in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru”. Poetics Today, Vol. 23, No. 4. Winter, 2002. White, Glyn and John Mundy. Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Television and Radio Comedy. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Willatt, Hugh (Sir). The Arts Council of Great Britain: The First 25 Years. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971. Williams, Raymond. Britain in the Sixties: Communications. London: Penguin Books, 1962. ---. “Culture and Technology.” Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Tony Pinkney, ed. London: Verso, 2007. ---. “The Politics of the Avant Garde.” Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Tony Pinkney, ed. London: Verso, 2007. Wilkins, Jill. Letter to Eva Figes. 19th May, 1970. Held in British Library. Wolfe, Tom. The Mid-Atlantic Man and Other New Breeds in England and America. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Mary Shiach, ed. London: Oxford Classics, 2000. Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033. London: Pelican, 1958. Žižek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London: Routledge, 2004. ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ---.“The Superego and the Act: A Lecture”. The European Graduate School Website. August, 1999. Web. 5th March, 2013.
Figure 1: Ngram search for term “experimental literature” 
Figure 2: Ngram search for terms “Groovy” and “Space Age” 
Figure 3: Pages 110 and 111 of Alan Burns’ Dreamerika 
Figure 4: Pages 618 and 619 of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru (The Carcanet Omnibus edition) 
Figure 5: Pages 88 and 89 of B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo 
Figure 6: Ngram search for term “The Establishment” 
Figure 7: Tables from Lowe (pg. 286) 
Figure 8: Table from Short (pg. 30) 
Figure 9: Graph from Short (pg. 224) 
Figure 10: Table from Sampson (pg. 196) 
F Figure 12: Graph from Harvey (pg. 146)
Figure 13: 
1 Speaking to Jonathan Coe for Like a Fiery Elephant, Joebear Webb recounts this saying of Johnson’s - “I make experiments but I don’t show them to anybody” (397) – with the implication that it was a phrase he often returned to in conversation. 2 Simon Reynolds, paraphrasing Tom Wolfe in Retromania, indicates how culture’s enthusiasm for the “Space Age” worked in both directions. At NASA “there had been a frenzy of missions, five between December 1968 and 1969. But… the lay-offs began while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on their victory tour. Its annual budget sank from $5 billion in the mid-sixties to $3 billion in the mid-seventies” (387). The public interest in Big Science was directly reflected in government budgeting. 3 Zulfikar Ghose, in spite of being very close to Johnson, was not as familiar with the others. In a letter of 16/9/73 he describes having only met Quin “briefly one winter [when] I went twice to a group of writers, mostly Calder people, in Hampstead (and then abandoned them because they bored me with their pious outlook)”. 4 A comparison with the experimental attitudes occurring in American literature, for example, demonstrates how in the place of a critique about class and manners there more often appears a critique of popular and high cultural form. Federman’s 1975 Surfiction promotes the “death of literature” as an anti-canonising gesture, while Rubin Rabinovitz, in “Mass Art and Cultural Decline”, invokes film and rock music as a remedy to a modernist art which appears to be “assuming the role of the defunct aristocracy” (369). The British experimental novelists’ belief in the redemption of the serious novel as a radical act is anathema to the American situation. 5 A further reading of influences could be developed here; aspects of Figes’ writing “in the moment” being similar to Gruppe 47 practice and Brooke-Rose’s invisible constraints borrowed from Oulipo. The results of all of these “experimental” methods, however, is always framed by the particularly British opposition to the Nineteenth Century mode. 6 Whether it was Burns’ personal influence is uncertain, but Calder too predicted a future in which readers would “be able to lie in bed, in the dark, with our eyes closed, and read in our minds a printed page, or perhaps simply a film, projected inside our skulls, through the media of wires attached to our skulls” (“The Novel”, 53) 7 Living spaces and the pride that comes with acquiring property is a little-noticed theme which recurs in Johnson’s work. He notes this pride in his friend Tony in The Unfortunates, comments on architecture’s relation to class throughout Albert Angelo and, according to Ghose, proudly showed off the “room where he will write” upon buying “a house in Dagmar Terrace” (“Bryan”, 34). 8 Although Beyond the Words does not feature Christine Brooke-Rose, letters between the two writers held in the Harry Ransom Centre show that she was invited, accepted, but was unable to contribute the section from Thru that she intended to due to her publisher stepping in to prevent it (Letter). 9 The overlaps between “experimental” literature and “underground” counterculture are fewer than one might expect. Ann Quin, as one of the only drug users amongst the group, demonstrates considerable influences of “hippy” culture in her novels – especially Tripticks. B.S. Johnson, on the other hand, successfully sued The Daily Mail for labelling him a “hippy”. From the counterculture’s perspective, as Charles Shaar Murray explained during the Oz trial, “Underground literature is virtually non-existent: Burroughs, Ginsberg and the late Jack Kerouac” (Palmer, 50) – no British authors, or even Sixties authors, are considered. 10 Anti-Oxbridge feeling may be one of the reasons that Christine Brooke-Rose distanced herself from other writers undertaking similar experimental projects to her own, she having been educated at Somerville College, Oxford. 11 Indeed, the early 1960s “Satire Boom” and much of the countercultural “underground” can be traced back to Oxbridge graduates. Similarly, New Left figures like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall sit comfortably between “Establishment” Oxbridge and the revolutionary left. As with the theory used in this thesis, any lack of subtlety involved in the categorisation of Oxbridge is here reflecting the collective experiences of the writers (other than Brooke-Rose). The perceived exclusivity of Oxbridge networks has a demonstrative psychological effect on uniting non-Oxbridge “experimental” writers in a shared cause. 12 This was an approach shared by the publishers of the Hungarian translation who presented the text as a bound paperback. The reasons for this editorial intervention were most likely financial, however, rather than aesthetic. 13 Interestingly, both Giles Gordon and Alan Burns move in their interviews from Johnson’s physicality to his wife’s beauty – seemingly justifying Johnson’s attitudes towards “investment” in women by implying that her attractiveness cancelled out his repellentness. 14 Another highly evocative example of Johnson’s class position amongst “Them” can be seen in his third notebook in which he makes a note of the middle class phrase “very comfortable people”. Clearly the phrase had struck him as worthy of writing down to be used elsewhere. The intention behind its future usage is demonstrated by an erratic, almost furious scribbling underlining of the word “comfortable”. The euphemistic language of the middle class is clearly the opposite of what Johnson would consider “truth”. 15 It may be argued that the “Interview with Father Joe” is in fact an internal dialogue that Johnson was having with himself, or with a character. However, the rushed note-taking style of its presentation and the fact that this technique of character development is not notable anywhere else would make this reading far less likely than assuming that the interview actually occurred – especially when Johnson’s background in journalism and his commitment to “truth” (especially regarding his actual trip on a trawler for Trawl) is also factored in. 16 “Prosaic” was, at the time of writing, held in the British Library and appears in a file containing various loose papers dated between 1968 and 1972. 17 See Juliette Wells for the Woolf/Figes connection. 18 These statistics represent what an economist would term “full employment”; the 1 to 2 per cent unemployment rate accounting for “structural unemployment” inevitable in any system outside of forced labour. 19 An example of the subject control verb would be “John refuses to work”, rather than “John is not working”. 20 Another circuitous connection can be found between Burroughs and Burns from the year 1970. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was the first book to be acquitted of an obscenity charge after the United States liberalised its obscenity laws in 1966 (Morgan, 342-343). This precedent opened the door to a dramatic rise in the amount of “hardcore” pornography published, leading to the establishment of the “United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography” whose reported findings, published in 1970, were edited for a British audience by Alan Burns in his role as former barrister, appearing as 1972’s To Deprave and Corrupt. 21 Burns goes on to use tape recording as the primary means of compiling material for The Angry Brigade (1973). The use of “transcription” is also seen in Ann Quin’s Three, another Calder-published novel. 22 Interestingly, Burns’ use of “found material” can be seen to originate here in the form of self-plagiarism. According to an interview with Madden appearing the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1997, “’Johnson in the Modern Eye’, the essay…, was originally written by me aged 16 and published in the school magazine” (110). Framed by Burns’ fictionalising narrative, however, this well-received essay is presented as having the opposite effect – getting the protagonist expelled. 23 Charles Sugnet, in “Burn’s Aleatoric Celebrations: Smashing Hegemony at the Sentence Level”, describes a number of Burns’ more unusual uses of his raw material, for example, “he, himself a lawyer, described the lawyers in Celebrations via a treatise on the mating habits of grasshoppers” (194). As will be seen, this process of incorporating seemingly unrelated material into his texts continues as far as The Angry Brigade and, although not covered here, is included in the later work The Day Daddy Died. 24 A view of Burns’ novels as individual pieces contributing to an overall experimental “movement” would justify B.S. Johnson’ remarks in his eighth notebook: “BABEL, it needed to be done, the way clear, now no one else needs to do it – valuable function” (16). 25 Burns himself reportedly used writing in a similar manner on a daily basis to provide structure to the seemingly spontaneous act of holding conversations: “before I meet someone, I make notes of topics that I’m going to talk about… not important business matters but just chit chat, maybe politics, I don’t know.” (Coe, 397). This habit, redolent of Burns’ works’ structured spontaneity infuriated B.S. Johnson whose own sensibilities concerning authenticity were no doubt deeply offended. 26 “To give a rather curious example: I had a friend, a young woman, who had to visit the dentist on a number of occasions. This dismal experience was made worse by the fact that as she sat there the dentist and his nurse, between whom there seemed to be something cooking, would gossip away one to the other, excluding the patient… [This is rewritten as a periphery character visiting the group’s squat and] being aware there were things going on that she was not part of, being distressed and disturbed and a bit frightened” (The Imagination on Trial, 164-165) 27 Robert Buckeye’s 2013 pamphlet Re: Quin appeared too late to be included within this chapter. As the work contains no new research this should not pose too great a problem. 28 British obscenity law is a subsection of libel law. 29 In a speech to the Rationalist Press Association’s annual conference in 1970, John Calder introduced himself in terms of his role as “Secretary in the Defence of Literature and the Arts Society, the principle body fighting Mary Whitehouse and fighting the various bodies that are trying to turn the clock back” (“The Novel”, 52). 30 Calder himself complained of how “one of the effects of the permissive society has been that erotica is no longer a guarantee that the book is going to sell” (“The Novel”, 51). 31 It is Artaud who allegedly first brought Marowitz into contact with the Calder circle – specifically Alan Burns, his collaborator on Palach. Schiele describes an event reported in the Guardian (30th April 1970) when a local dignitary at the Harrogate Festival spoke of “the need for modern artists to remember the affairs of the spirit” (92) and used Burns as an example of one failing in this. Burns then jumped on stage and recited Artaud’s poem “Shit to the Spirit”, at which point Marowitz too jumped on stage “crying, ‘I commission you to write a play’” (92). 32 In spite of writing numerous times and at quite reasonable depth about his appreciation of B.S. Johnson and his work, Calder never quite manages to get the spelling of his name correct throughout Pursuit (2001). This is perhaps a case of Calder’s hard-line stance towards presenting his memoirs “uncensored” leading him to refuse an editor as well. The same eccentric spelling also appears in Calder’s introduction to The Nouveau Roman Reader (1986), suggesting he went at least twenty years without being corrected. 33 At the time of writing, Giles Gordon’s introduction preceding “The Unmapped Country” in Beyond the Words constitutes the evidence that it was Quin’s final piece of writing. Further research into primary sources would be necessary to either contradict or fully validate his statement. 34 The separation of lived life experiences from their material consequences that the drug experience imbues is interestingly mirrored in Quin’s contribution to J.G. Ballard’s literary magazine, Ambit. “Dr [Martin] Bax and I ran a competition… for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs… the best of all the writing was done by Ann Quin, under the influence of the contraceptive pill” (Frick). Quin’s framing of the Pill as something belonging with LSD, marijuana and amphetamines as part of the “drug culture” has interesting repercussions for the rest of her writing. 35 Interestingly, this is something Brooke-Rose herself picks up on later, see “Remaking”. 36 There are numerous references to Pound in Thru and the simultaneity of Brooke-Rose’s work would suggest that its influence would merit further academic study. 37 Many of Brooke-Rose’s novels rely on this ability to “explain themselves” in the blurb, a technique later justified by her work with OuLiPo, and often demanded by the publisher. A letter to Michael Schmidt of Carcanet regarding Xorandor and part of a discussion on his recommendation that she remove all personal pronouns from the text went as far as to suggest that although “it will be invisible, like my other constraints… you can add it to the blurb if you like”. 38 Although Brooke-Rose’s reversal of imperialist racial hierarchy (the “colourless” persecuted by people of colour with the intention that “the irrationality of racism [be] laid bare” (Invisible Author, 17)) may appear a little heavy-handed to the contemporary reader, the implication was in fact too subtle for one reviewer in 1965 who suggested that “for us poor whites… this novel could be a clinical ‘1984’” (“New Novels”). Download 0.73 Mb. Share with your friends:
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igure 11: Table from Willatt (pg. 11)